Reviewing Pulino’s, Sam Sifton quotes Richard Price and calls it “Restaurant dressed as theater dressed as nostalgia.”
Liberty Magazine, which ceased publication in 1950, is being revived online—sort of. Robert Whiteman has 1,387 issues worth of Liberty material in his basement, and on a pulpy new website—emblazoned “The Stories Never Die!”—he occasionally highlights old articles that echo current events. “Everything has a beginning, a middle and an end,” Whiteman told the Times. “Liberty’s material is so relevant today it makes me feel, at age 84, that I am at the beginning.” That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but the site explains itself, in part, as “a pop culture time capsule,” which certainly sounds familiar.
As if Asteroids, Battleship, Monopoly, Candyland and the Viewmaster weren’t enough, get ready for Magic 8-Ball: The Movie.
Preserving the world’s disappearing languages is a little like a preemptive strike against nostalgia—if we don’t lose anything, after all, we don’t ever have to be nostalgic for it. This article talks about efforts to preserve endangered languages, and also points out the impossibility of actually preserving everything, and the fact that sometimes (sometimes!) we lose things for a reason.
Weezer pretends that they don’t really like their album that everyone else loves, Pinkerton, but maybe they’re finally confronting the fact that it’s a golden era actually worth revisiting—they’re reissuing it in a “deluxe, expanded edition.”
In the excellent Obit magazine, Kevin Nance’s essay on the closing of a diner that was a Chicago institution starts out as a lovely, if predictable, meditation on losing places that are easy to take for granted, and turns rather heartbreakingly into an obituary of a more personal sort.
How I Met Your Motherboard is the latest memory-obsessed project from Jason Bitner (Found magazine, Cassette From my Ex, which I wrote about here). It collects peoples’ stories from the early days of computing.
Last week, Andrew Potter was on Marketplace talking about his book The Authenticity Hoax. When host Tess Vigeland asked him if there’s ever actually been a time when things were actually pure and authentic, Potter said, “I think not. I think all nostalgia is always nostalgia for the present, so the nostalgia you feel is just simply a projection of your own current unhappiness.” I don’t think nostalgia is always a result of unhappiness, or a projection of it, but it’s worth thinking about instances where that is the case, and the ways the “conspicuous authenticity” Potter talks about in the book (buying organic produce, wearing pre-distressed clothes…) is inspired by some idea of authenticity that never really existed.
And David Hasselhoff misses the old days, when (supposedly) everyone would have thought it was awesome that he was a complete fuck-up. “Back then things were different. Back then every star smoked and drank,” he told The Sun. “Think of Richard Burton or Humphrey Bogart. But nobody scrutinized them. Every kind of consumption was normal.”